Road trip to Aachen

It's not Paris or Rome but Aachen has a lot to offer ... I think. We didn't see much but we bought a lot of wool.

I had been thinking about renting a bigger van to take on a test road trip with Marianne to see if the larger interior and the onboard toilet would make it easier for her to manouvre around. I found a great van for rent in Bischofszell and asked Marianne where she would like to go for a test road trip. I had already thought maybe head down to the lakes of Ticino, or the Lake of Como in Northern Italy, or maybe even down as far as the Italian riviera. But Marianne had other ideas and she immediately suggested we go to Aachen. What's in Aachen?, you might well ask. Well apart from being a spa city near Germany’s borders with Belgium and the Netherlands, Aachen has a beautiful Cathedral which was founded around 800 A.D which houses many medieval artifacts including the shrine of Charlemagne, who was buried here in 814. Charlemagne, or Charles the Great, ruled over an empire which spanned over more than a dozen of Europe’s modern states, from the Netherlands to northern Italy, from Spain to the Czech Republic and he is often invoked as a unifying symbol of Europe. So yeah, a pretty important guy in European history. But we really went there to meet Erhard Junghans. It was Erhard Junghans who opened the first Junghans wool store in Aachen in 1950.

But first .... we had to get there!

Junghans-Wolle is still family owned and is now managed by Erhard's grandson. Their Creativ-Shop in Aachen covers an area of 700m2 and sells everything a knitter would need.